Space in the city

Text to Speech Software - Some Free

2010-07-28T10:55:00.000-07:00

NaturalReader is a Text to Speech software with natural sounding voices. This easy to use software can convert any written text such as MS Word, Webpage, PDF files, and Emails into spoken words. NaturalReader can also convert any written text into audio files such as MP3 or WAV for your CD player or iPod.

Read more in 2007 article

AT&T Natural Voices is an award winning text to speech technology developed by AT&T Laboratories and distributed by Wizzard Software. Natural Voices is believed by many to be the most natural sounding TTS available, the "highly scalable" multi-threaded technology can automate and add tremendous interactive and humanistic value to a wide variety of applications and projects.

- Version 4.2 AT&T Natural Voices Server Text to Speech (TTS) for Windows or Linux

- Implemented with a developers software developer kit (SDK) and distributable runtime software

- Dynamically converts text into voice for a wide variety of applications

- Applauded by many as the most realistic human-sounding synthetic voices

- Implemented with a flexible "engine + voice font" architecture

- Supports customization of pronunciations, acronyms, abbreviations, speaking rate

- Scalable for high volume multi-thread IVR type implementations

- Distributable runtime software is available for (20) voices in (8) languages including US English, UK English, Indian English, French, Canadian French, German, Italian, and Spanish

Download Opera Web Browser and you can have a block of text read to you by Opera, select the text and use the command "Opera speak". Alternatively, say "Opera read" to hear the next block of text after your currently highlighted position. If no text is highlighted, Opera will go to the first block of text on the page. Try the "speak" command on the following paragraph:

It was not long before someone knocked at the house-door and called: ‘Open the door, dear children; your mother is here, and has brought something back with her for each of you.’ But the little kids knew that it was the wolf, by the rough voice. ‘We will not open the door,’ cried they, ‘you are not our mother. She has a soft, pleasant voice, but your voice is rough; you are the wolf!’

Insight into choice

2010-07-27T21:45:00.000-07:00

Product developer and marketer can gain much needed insight into customer behavior by diving into the question as to how people make choices and how choices influence their happiness. Watch the following videos on the current thinking on choices.

Video #1 - Malcolm Gladwell makes a larger argument about the nature of choice and happiness – Embracing the diversity of human being you will find a sure way to happiness. Move away from search for universals and search for variability.

Video #2 - Sheena Iyengar studies how we make choices -- and how we feel about the choices we make. Her groundbreaking research that has uncovered some surprising attitudes about our decisions.

Video #3 - Paradox of Choice - freedom of choice. In Schwartz's estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied.

Video #4 - Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.

Path To Growth

2009-06-15T05:31:00.001-07:00

Making of Behavioral economics - Health Market Bubble

2009-05-19T23:25:00.000-07:00

Link to play Dan Ariely talk at TED click here

Read more at Dan Ariely's blog

Are we going to forget what we just learned?

28th April 2009, 08:52 am

Paul Krugman published an op-ed yesterday about exec salaries.

The very sad conclusion he comes to is that because the financial markets seem to be on an improving trajectory (although it is hard to know if this reflects a real improvements in the economy yet) the push to reform the banks could die off. As Krugman puts it: “In 2008, overpaid bankers taking big risks with other people’s money
brought the world economy to its knees. The last thing we need is to
give them a chance to do it all over again.”

We are now in a unique point in time where we just realized the mess we got ourselves into by assuming that the markets will be perfectly rational — and I sure hope we are not going to forget this painful lesson just because the market seem to be slightly higher these days. In fact, I suspect that what we need to do is take this lesson to heart and expand our search for other markets that are just waiting for similar disasters (and the health market looks to me to be heading is similar direction..)

New Search Engine - wolframalpha

2009-05-18T06:51:00.000-07:00

First Review - wolframalpha Very good Website for analysis of data. Check out the examples page to review some query results

About the company -
Goals
Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries

Review about wolfarmalpha

NYtime.com - The Veil Is Lifted From Wolfram Alpha

CNN.com - New search engines aspire to supplement Google

Telegraph.co.uk - Wolfram Alpha v Google: Which is better?

Youtube Demo -

Harvardbusiness blog - Wolfram Alpha vs. Google = Power vs. Simplicity?

Some have said his new project may rival Google because it goes well beyond simple searching of information to computation of useful knowledge. For example, if you ask it "What is the GDP of France divided by it population?" it will not only get the results, but you can look at the details underneath. (Try that on Google!) I also think it competes Wikipedia because it is a useful reference resource.
There is a wonderful tension between the universality of use and the usefulness of a tool. Contrary to popular belief, the most powerful tools we create as humans take effort to learn to. Mathematics, language, biology, all take years to become fluent in. Put another way, any literate person can use Google in their own language — it takes seconds to learn. But the process of becoming literate takes years to master. Google "rides on top of" our ability to read and write.
One of the great tragedies of the current computer revolution is the widespread expectation that every piece of software should be easy to use. Well, easy-to-use tools such as Google are useful to everyone, but because Google assumes that people will not make the effort to learn anything, they have to provide simple — even simplistic — interfaces. If the mass public expected that they might have to do a little learning and work, Google, Microsoft, and others could provide even more powerful tools for helping knowledge workers — but our education system and culture expect nothing of us as users. It is unfortunate.
Wolfram's tool, due to its deep logic and structure, will make demands on users — and in order to use it well, people will need to learn some new concepts and a query language. This means it will not have the widespread adoption of a Google-like tool. Still, I am optimistic. We all need search tools, and we should have other, more sophisticated tools that can help us participate in the creation of new knowledge, and new ways of looking at information. Attention is a vital measure, but not the only one that counts.
One way Wolfram might enhance our learning about his tool would be to mash up Wolfram Alpha with Twitter (which is Warhol/Avon-like), because one of the great challenges of using Wolfram Alpha is to format the right question to solicit an interesting answer. Twitter would be a great way to share and publish queries that had cool answers. Again, I think if he can tap into the Warhol/Avon effect, he'll have faster adoption, and we'll all learn more along the way.

Banks - Stress Test - Fed Reserve

2009-05-17T10:12:00.000-07:00

Stress Test = The Supervisory Capital Assessment Program (SCAP)

Release Date: May 7, 2009 For release at 5:00 p.m. EDT

The results of a comprehensive, forward-looking assessment of the financial conditions of the nation's 19 largest bank holding companies (BHCs) by the federal bank supervisory agencies were released on Thursday...

Overview of Results

3D Web Browser - SpaceTime

2007-06-16T09:39:00.000-07:00

SpaceTime has innovated its proprietary 3D technology to make surfing the Web a multidimensional and visually rich experience. The SpaceTime application allows anyone to navigate the Web in a 3D environment as they browse, search and shop using Google, Yahoo!, Flickr, eBay and more. SpaceTime, Inc. is based in New York, New York.

SpaceTime revolutionizes the process of Web searching with three key functionalities: 3D Search, 3D eBay Search, and 3D Tabbed Browsing.

Review Shop the tech trio

2007-06-16T09:21:00.000-07:00

The Tech Trio
tomshardware.com

anandtech.com

Find great schools - How your local school doing

2007-06-10T21:32:00.000-07:00

In April 2007, I stumbled upon this neat web 2.0 site Greatschool.net. And in June 2007 it won the peoples choice webby award. Yahoo education website and Yahoo Real Estate website use greatschool to power their search

A subscription based website - neighborhoodscout helps you find homes in good public school district.

SchoolMatters gives policymakers, educators, and parents the tools they need to make better-informed decisions that improve student performance. SchoolMatters will educate, empower, and engage education stakeholders. Read more

Find School, Libraries & College from - The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), located within the U.S. Department of Education and the Institute of Education Sciences, is the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education.

Learn how to Juggle 3 balls

2007-06-10T12:16:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Surface

2007-05-30T17:45:00.000-07:00

The software giant announced today at the D5 conference that it’s built a new touchscreen computer—a coffee table that will change the world. Go inside its top-secret development with PopularMechanics.com, then forget the keyboard and mouse: The next generation of computer interfaces will be hands-on.

Final Assembly Begins on First Boeing 787 Dreamliner

2007-05-22T21:01:00.000-07:00

EVERETT, Wash., May 21, 2007 -- Final assembly of the all-new Boeing [NYSE: BA] 787 Dreamliner began today with a ceremony in Everett, Wash.

"Today we begin assembling the first airplane of a new generation," said Scott Strode, 787 vice president of Airplane Definition and Production. "The 787 not only will revolutionize air travel, it represents a new way of building airplanes."

With 568 firm orders from 44 airlines, the 787 is the fastest-selling new airplane in aviation history. The 787 production system was designed using Lean manufacturing techniques in a simplified final assembly process.

"The 787 production system is the culmination of the lessons we've learned building previous airplanes," said Steve Westby, 787 vice president of Manufacturing and Quality. "Using composites on the 787 airframe has a number of manufacturing advantages. We are able to build huge structure in just one piece, which means we essentially have six major end items coming together in final assembly -- the forward, center and aft fuselage sections, the wings, the horizontal stabilizer and the vertical fin. "

Since the 787 is assembled from these large assemblies rather than many smaller pieces, traditional monument assembly tools are not necessary. Portable tools, designed with ergonomics in mind, move the assemblies into place. No overhead cranes are used to move airplane structure.

"A composite airframe also means less waste in production and fewer hazardous materials used during the assembly process," Westby said. "This is good news for the environment and for our team of manufacturing technicians building the airplane."

Although the first airplane will take about seven weeks to assemble, the 787 team looks to continuously improve flow time as production ramps up. Ultimately, a 787 will roll out of the factory every three days.

The first 787 will roll out of the factory on July 8, 2007.

Learn Counting backwards from the movies

2007-05-22T20:38:00.000-07:00

Pretty cool

Splenda not natural and settles lawsuit

2007-05-11T18:06:00.000-07:00

Merisant lawyer Gregg LoCascio said in his closing argument Thursday that Splenda's makers chose not to use the phrase “does not contain sugar” on packaging, because “it was good for business.” He says Equal unfairly lost millions in sales and profits...read more

More from AP--

Settlement talks began after jurors asked the judge for a calculator and expert reports from both sides on how to determine damages. Lawyers rushed to the judge's office to try to delay the jury's announcement and then huddled in a courthouse meeting room.

McNeil's own consultants said its slogan confused potential customers, some of whom thought that Splenda was sugar without the calories, Merisant's attorneys said. McNeil rejected a plan to add the phrase "does not contain sugar" to the front of Splenda's yellow box, which might have cleared up the confusion, Merisant said.

Text-to-speech application on the web

2007-05-04T06:00:00.000-07:00

2010 update on text-to-speech read more here

There aren't may text-to-speech application available online. It would be great if it could read you the complete webpage. NPR does it by allowing your to stream content of each page one after another (but then they are a radio station). So why not have website that will read you all the article in the page without having to buy any software.

Bluegrind and new web 2.0 website in beta stage (serious beta stage!) will read you a news article, blog and they claim its like having a personal news anchor reading the news to you every day. It doesn't just stop at your computer, you can take it with you wherever you go.

What are the other Text-to-Speech (TTS) web application out there? Not many but we have found some cool research sites that let you read text. The best of them all AT&T research website. Yes AT&T. This application will read in 15 voices/language, there is a 300 character limit to the text you can input a a given time.

IBM's Research into TTS
This page demonstrates some of IBM's work in unconstrained text-to-speech research. IBM's system generation process is automatic and can be built for any custom voice. From each voice recording, small segments of speech are extracted and stored in there speech database. During synthesis, these speech segments are assembled using specially crafted algorithms to generate any word in the language. Type in your text and check it out.

Oddcast demo website uses sitepal to create a TTS application check it out

Investments Book - John C. Bogle - Common Sense Investing

2007-05-04T05:31:00.000-07:00

The Little Book of Common Sense Investing as your guide, you’ll discover how to make investing a winner’s game:

Why business reality—dividend yields and earnings growth—is more important than market expectations
How to overcome the powerful impact of investment costs, taxes, and inflation
How the magic of compounding returns is overwhelmed by the tyranny of compounding costs
What expert investors and brilliant academics—from Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham to Paul Samuelson and Burton Malkiel—have to say about index investing

More Links
Search at ugenie for the lowest price (ISBN: 0470102101). Read more about it at Amazon. Read more about it at other blogs - ValueBlogReview & SeekingAlpha. Also listen to or read the transcript to John Bogle's interview at marketplace money.

New Comparison Shopping website Ugenie and more

2007-05-03T18:21:00.000-07:00

Searching for the best deal on books especially textbooks? Well there are quite a few sites that you can go to search for books. Recently an new website ugenie (still in BETA) claims that it not only finds the best price on a single product, but on groups of products which it calls a 'bundle'.To do so ugenie has developed an algorithm that searches about 40 web sites for information about prices of books, movies, music, and games to come up with the cheapest bundles that consumers can buy from these shopping sites. To search for textbook on Ugenie click here.

Other Books search website

The book search engine that allows you to comparison shop
more than 40 online bookstores including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Borders.
You can expect the most complete book search and the best price Internet-wide when you use AddAl

CampusBooks searches dozens of bookstores, thousands of sellers, and millions of new and used textbooks to find you the lowest textbook prices on the Internet. Compare prices on your textbooks now using the search box, or find textbooks at your campus using your school booklist below.

Search for text books at Half.com

AbeBooks, the world’s largest online marketplace for books, lists over 100 million new, used, rare, and out-of-print books from more than 13,500 booksellers. This great selection delivers value for all: readers find bestsellers, collectors find rare books, students find textbooks, and treasure hunters find books they’ve been seeking forever.

Caltech Students Strike Oil - Olive Oil

2007-05-01T17:37:00.000-07:00

Heard on NPR ...

California Institute of Technology sophomore Dvin Adalian and junior Ricky Jones, about their successful olive oil production, from olives collected from the campus's trees.hear more...

From LA Times

...In October, the ripening crop snagged the attention of students Ricky Jones and Dvin Adalian. They began an exercise that might date to Socrates' pupils in ancient Greece: whacking olive trees with a stick (in this case, a plastic pipe) and collecting what falls....

Heard on Campus

...Caltech students and grounds maintenance crews got a lesson in olive cultivation recently, when Craig Makela, the president of the Santa Barbara Olive Company, came to campus. His visit was part of the Institute's new sustainability venture to turn dozens of its ornamental olive trees into a cash crop of fruit-bearing olive trees. The Institute plans to hold an olive harvest festival in the fall, which the Caltech community will be invited to participate in. After the olives are picked, they will be crated and trucked to Santa Barbara, where they will be turned into olive oil. The oil will then be bottled and returned to the Institute for distribution. If all goes as planned, Caltech will have about 300 gallons of extra virgin olive oil to sell, Makela said. The enterprise developed after two undergraduates, Dvin Adalian and Ricky Jones, spent a day picking olives last fall and then made a batch of oil, some of which they presented to Caltech president Jean-Lou Chameau and his wife, Carol Carmichael, senior counselor for external relations and faculty associate in Engineering and Applied Science. In return, the students and some of their friends were treated to dinner at the president's house.

When Bad Ideas find VC's money - Shopping website & WhatTheHell Award

2007-04-30T18:22:00.000-07:00

Here I am going to list few shopping website that don't make sense at any level other than being well packaged and meeting some VC's (Venture Capitalist - as my good friend would call it poor S@#K$r) checklist for a Shopping web 2.0 site. Have we reached a web 2.0 bubble? These website would validate it - excess supply of money chasing few good ideas and irrational exuberance (anything social networking gets money).

Here is my WhatTheHell list

1) Stylefeeder

2) This Next

3) Yub

4) Crowd Storm (Winner of WhatTheHell Award)

Building Boeing 787 - Interactive guide

2007-04-29T10:35:00.000-07:00

Pandora & Finetune - Internet Radio

2007-04-28T20:04:00.000-07:00

Pandora is a site for music lover. You enter songs 0r artists that you like and it streams out similar songs to you. Is a great way to find new music for free

Also read about the bill to save Internet Radio. Pandora is for US listening due to the licensing restriction. If you are outside use you could use finetune. Finetune is similar to Pandora which allows you to create your own playlist and share it too.

Buyer Beware -- Price Optimization

2007-04-28T11:55:00.000-07:00

Price optimization software now making it possible to price product based on customers behavior, sales history, competitors' price, product mix and the fact that people are hard-wired to love sales - when we see good deal (mark down), a different part of the brain lights up than with a loss (price rise)

Read more about it in this AP article - Software helps some stores decide when the price is right

Some results of price-optimization software:
Like many national companies, one electronics retailer priced batteries the same all over — until SAP's Khimetrics software showed that consumers in Dallas were generally willing to pay more for batteries than people in Boston. The data revealed another twist: The battery that had the highest "price sensitivity" in Dallas had the lowest price sensitivity in Boston. In other words, while Texans would buy this particular battery only within a narrow price range, Bostonians were far less picky. The store altered its prices accordingly, sold more batteries and made more money.

A grocer charged high prices for ice cream but frequently offered deep discounts. Consumers largely bought ice cream only during the promotions. Khimetrics advised reducing the regular price of ice cream and running fewer sales. Eventually revenue and profits rose.

At a store that offered an array of paintbrushes, the best-seller was its cheapest one, at $1. DemandTec suggested the store stop selling the item. The software showed that doing so would help the store sell more higher-priced (and more profitable) paintbrushes because the key factor in paintbrush sales was whether a customer was buying paint, not the price of a brush.

How was pricing done in the past or still done?
According to survey conducted at the Pricing Institute’s 18th Annual PriceX Conference held in Chicago, Illinois in June, found that:

61 percent of companies use a spreadsheet to determine price not a specialized pricing application or vendor
56 percent of companies have some sort of pricing strategy in place
44 percent of companies have a dedicated pricing person or department responsible for pricing
35 percent of companies consider pricing a top priority.

Reuters reports another survey, this one of members of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE), found that 38 percent of respondents reported higher prices during the second quarter. Additionally, 43 percent of respondents anticipated raising prices during the next three months.

Companies that have price optimization products (click on the image):

Netvibes - About having the web the way you want it

2007-04-27T20:10:00.000-07:00

Whats different about Netvibes? How does it stack up against say a rss reader or my.msn.com or my.yahoo.com? For one Netvibes users will two (2) pages for every account: a private page, where you subscribe to all the content for your personal, everyday use, and a public page, where you can allow others to access your favorite content -- everything that you love on the web.

Here is one more thing you will like about it if you have a widescreen monitor it will fill it up end to end plus no annoying google ad or flashy ads.

Netvibes is about having web the way you want it. Exactly the way you want it. Delivered to you.

So check out it out for yourself: Netvibes Also check out Moby's Netvibe page.

To read more about guy behind Netvibes read it article in business 2.0 "Web users feel the 'Vibes'

List of similar web services
Pageflakes
Protopage
Google Homepage
Start
My Yahoo
My MSN

Find Owner of a Brand

2007-04-25T22:15:00.000-07:00

Want to know who owns a particular Brand? Find Owner Search allows you to:

Find the owner of a brand name
Find all the brands owned by an individual or company
Find brands in a given area/category.

To start your brand search Click here . Find Owner Search can be very helpful for:

Advertising agencies to track companies, their brands and competing brands for purposes of gaining new business and/or naming new products and services.
Marketing and Media companies to track all the companies and/or Brands in one category.
Consumers for quickly learning the address and other brands owned by any company for purposes of buying new products and services, complaining to senior management, or seeking a job at a particular company.

Customer service Survey

2007-04-25T20:57:00.000-07:00

MSN Money-Zogby customer-service survey. Read more about it click on the article below

The Customer Service Hall of Shame
How companies were ranked

Here's a look at our full results:

	"Poor"	"Fair"	"Good"	"Excellent"
Bottom 10
Sprint Nextel	40%	28%	25%	7%
Bank of America	30%	25%	32%	13%
Comcast	30%	33%	28%	10%
Time Warner Cable	29%	35%	28%	8%
AT&T	26%	36%	31%	7%
Citibank	24%	34%	35%	8%
Wal-Mart	23%	32%	32%	13%
Verizon	22%	31%	36%	11%
Wells Fargo	21%	27%	38%	14%
DirecTV	20%	29%	33%	17%
Dishonorable mentions
Dell	19%	26%	40%	15%
Circuit City	19%	35%	39%	8%
Best Buy	14%	31%	42%	13%
Home Depot	13%	29%	43%	14%
Sears	12%	33%	45%	10%
Macy's	10%	30%	47%	13%